Award-winning underwater filmmaker fell in love with water in Mobile

Ben Raines -

Before he’d cruised over the wreckage of the Titanic in a submarine, before he dove beneath both polar ice caps, before he won an Emmy for his undersea filmwork, Mike deGruy was just another kid from Mobile in love with the water.

Armed with scuba gear he bought in a local pawnshop, deGruy was 12 when he took a class at the YMCA and made his first dive in Perdido Pass under the Alabama Point bridge.

“I was instantly in love because, basically, I felt like I had just learned to fly,” deGruy said.

Since then, he’s made a life filming undersea wonders in all the world’s oceans. But the Gulf, he said, remains his favorite. Images of oil boiling into the first ocean he ever knew left his gut twisted into knots, he said.

“I just thought, ‘My gosh, what have we done? How did we let this happen?’” deGruy said Tuesday as he prepared for tonight’s presentation at the Arthur R. Outlaw Mobile Convention Center. DeGruy is in Mobile for the Bays and Bayous Symposium being held today and Thursday.

“My stomach churned. It never went away. Coming down here, seeing all of these people who had no idea this switch would get flipped and their livelihood would go away, that was powerful,” deGruy said. “I realized they had no idea how to stop the thing, no contingency for handling a blow out.”

His work has been seen by millions, particularly through documentaries such as the acclaimed Blue Planet series. Tonight’s presentation will include footage shot all over the world, some of it while he was wearing a self-contained diving suit known as a Newtsuit, designed for ultra deep diving. The bulky yellow suit looks like a robot from a 1950s movie, or, as deGruy sees it, like the Michelin tire man.

“It’s got a full on propulsion pack that you drive with your feet. Your toes make it go forward, you heels go back. One foot to turn,” deGruy said. “That’s a blast. It’s the ultimate video game, only your inside of the thing.”

He said that he is shifting gears in the wake of the spill, planning to film Gulf habitats from the marshes to the dark world 5,000 feet down where the Deepwater Horizon well was located. For that trip, deGruy will be aboard the Alvin, one of the deepest-diving research submarines in the world.

“The Gulf just has incredible features, things I’ve never seen anywhere else. Hydrothermal vents, cold seeps, the brine lakes. Those are insane!” deGruy said, referring to areas of super-salty water on the seafloor. The water in the brine lakes is so heavy with salt it doesn’t mix with the regular seawater but creates pools on the bottom of the ocean that appear to have shorelines and beaches.

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